Self-driving cars have been a leading force in car making for a while now. A concerning question that arises with the development of the automatic cars is how safe is it to be safe enough?
The safety features of current self-dring cars developed by Waymo. http://www.justscience.in/articles/impact-colonoscopy-testing-colon-cancer-rates/2017/12/15
For human drivers, we have drivers test to validate the ability to drive on the streets. However, for these self-driving cars, what are the standards? Do the cars have to obtain their driver licence as well before they can go on the road?
In a 2016 study, Kalra and a colleague showed that self-driving cars would have to trek hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of miles to demonstrate with comfortable certainty that they caused fewer fatalities than the average person (about 1.1 per 100 million miles driven). Based on the current number of self-driving cars, that task could take decades or centuries to complete.
Tech developers hardly have that kind of time, so companies like Waymo assess their vehicles’ safety by pairing real driving time with practice on a private track and millions of miles a day in computer simulations.
However, there are still some concerning questions as simulations cannot account for some absurd situations that might occur. The University of Michigan came up with general guidelines for safe self-driving cars. Can self-driving vehicles compensate for contributions to crash causation by other traffic participants, as well as vehicular, roadway and environmental factors? Can all relevant inputs for computational decisions be supplied to a self-driving vehicle? Can computational speed, constant vigilance, and lack of distractibility of self-driving vehicles make predictive knowledge of an experienced driver irrelevant?
The hesitance to provide a safe enough vehicle has been one of the major hindering factors when it comes to the development of self-driving vehicles as no company is willing to take the risk in selling potentially dangerous cars.
Therefore, some test similar to the standardized crash test for regular cars should be applied to self-driving vehicles to assess the chances of accidents due to machine error and human driving errors.
Here is a video uploaded by Ted-ed explaining some other dilemmas when it comes to self-driving cars.
